


Lifesaver

by nivo



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-03 00:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5270444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nivo/pseuds/nivo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Did you shoplift this lollipop?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lifesaver

“I need a drink,” Baekhyun moans, muffled, into his hands.

Jongdae stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk to boggle at him.

“What?”

“You've been out of jail for, what, _twelve seconds_?”

“There's no need to yell,” Baekhyun hisses, one bloodshot eye peeking out from between his fingers to glare at Jongdae balefully.

“ _I'm not yelling_ ,” Jongdae yells. “ _What is wrong with you_.”

“I'm serious, Jongdae, I'm gonna puke on you if you don't cut that shit out.”

It really says something about the morning Jongdae's having that at this point, he probably wouldn't even care much. Knowing the nature and extent of his roommate's hangovers, puking is an imminent fixture in their near future, anyway.

“Please tell me you drove,” Baekhyun says.

“No, I didn't drive. You had the car, asshole, remember?”

“Oh,” Baekhyun says. “Really?”

Jongdae feels a little bit like crying, and a lot like putting his hands around Baekhyun's skinny neck and _squeezing_.

At six in the morning, the bus is mostly empty. Jongdae drags Baekhyun all the way to the back anyway, just in case.

“If you get sick and thrown off, you're walking home on your own,” he tells him, steeling his heart against Baekhyun's crestfallen look. “I'm serious. I'm so done with you.”

“ _Fine_.”

Baekhyun slumps against him as the bus lurches into motion, his pointy chin digging into Jongdae's shoulder painfully. Jongdae gets a whiff of his hair and wrinkles his nose.

“Geez, did you smoke?”

“Yeah. Like, a whole pack,” Baekhyun murmurs dejectedly. No wonder he sounds like he's been gargling marbles. “It was awesome.”

Jongdae sighs and wraps an arm around his narrow shoulders, squeezes more gently than he meant to. “When you fuck up, you _really_ fuck up, huh?”

Baekhyun makes a small, affirmative noise, closing his eyes. The delicate skin of his lids looks bruised; Jongdae can't decide if it's just the smudged eyeliner, or something more permanent.

At home, Baekhyun falls into bed and sleeps for ten hours straight, at which point he stumbles, barely awake, into the bathroom. Jongdae waits by the door, kind of pissed at himself for feeling more concerned than angry by now.

He _should be_ angry, dammit. He's got every right to be angry at the loser who lost his car somewhere between getting dead drunk and vandalizing a 7-Eleven for _a bottle of water_ , then woke him up at the asscrack of dawn to be bailed out of jail.

Baekhyun deserves no sympathy for having the most ridiculously dramatic quarterlife crisis Jongdae's ever been unfortunate enough to witness. It's not Jongdae's fault Baekhyun can't stop smoking for good or keep a relationship going to save his life, that he can't just _talk_ about shit or publicly humiliate himself by crying in the middle of campus like any normal college student cracking under the pressure.

“Did you fall in?” Jongdae calls when Baekhyun's been suspiciously quiet for a few minutes.

“You wish,” Baekhyun croaks, opening the door to shuffle past him.

“Do I even want to know why you're limping?”

“Ha ha.”

“No, seriously.” Jongdae follows him into his room, frowning as Baekhyun drops face-first back onto his bed. He's still fully dressed in last night's t-shirt and jeans; hell, he's still got his socks on. What a moron.

“I dunno,” Baekhyun mumbles into his pillow. “I guess I fucked up my ankle.”

“How did you fuck up your ankle?” Jongdae asks patiently, sitting on the bed to drag Baekhyun's right leg into his lap.

“ _I dunno_ ,” Baekhyun whines again. “'S fine.”

“It's clearly not fine,” Jongdae tells him wryly, feeling the joint with careful fingers. “Have I mentioned today that you're too stupid to live? Why is there a fucking lollipop in your sock?”

Baekhyun props himself up on his elbows and squints down at his own leg blearily.

“Oh. Must've grabbed that at some point at the store. They gave it back with my personal effects.”

“Baekhyun,” Jongdae says calmly. “Did you shoplift this lollipop?”

“Kind of? Like, accidentally.”

“And then you... jammed it down your sock like a dirty little thief?”

“If you want to put it like that.”

Jongdae loses it at this point.

“It's really not that funny,” Baekhyun mutters at him, sounding cross.

Jongdae just laughs harder, giving up the lollipop without a fight when Baekhyun starts pawing at his hand.

Baekhyun unwraps the thing and sticks it in his mouth. He rolls the candy around on his tongue, his cheeks working as he sucks on it, watching Jongdae with sleepy, unblinking eyes the whole time. There's something devastatingly elegant about his long fingers wrapped around the stick, about the angle of his cocked wrist. The lolli finally resurfaces with a wet, obscene-sounding _pop_ , shiny and red against plush lips.

Jongdae stops laughing.

“Thanks, Jongdae,” Baekhyun says in this low, languid voice, his little pink tongue flicking out to lick at that stupid fucking lollipop. “For everything.”

And _this_ , right here, is why Jongdae can't have peace in his life. Baekhyun looks like shit warmed over, objectively speaking, but for some reason it just doesn't seem to matter. It never seems to matter when it's Baekhyun.

“You're like this walking, talking blowjob reference,” Jongdae tells him, because he's been up since four in the morning and living with this kind of shit for the past two years and he's just — _done_. Completely, one-hundred-percent done pretending he's unaffected by Baekhyun's antics. Not that he's ever had much success with that, if Baekhyun's smirk is anything to go by.

“It's no accident,” Baekhyun says around his lollipop. “You have no idea how hard I work at it.”

“At what, giving unsuspecting passersby inappropriate boners?”

Baekhyun wriggles his foot out of Jongdae's lax grip and places it, very carefully, high up on Jongdae's thigh, the tips of his toes almost but not quite touching Jongdae's fly. Jongdae is so hard he can't even move; just sits there, frozen, right where Baekhyun wants him.

“Unsuspecting passersby, suspicious passersby,” Baekhyun says, shrugging coyly. “ _You_.”

“You're a _menace_ ,” Jongdae tells him, feeling some improbable combination of exasperation and lust and sheer, genuine _fondness_ all tangled up inside his chest, like a physical ache. “And you look like a fucking panda with that shitty eyeliner all over your face.”

“Weak,” Baekhyun murmurs, amused. The lollipop is shoved against the inside of his mouth, his cheek bulging obscenely with it.

Jongdae's had enough.

Baekhyun makes a soft, shocked little noise as Jongdae yanks the candy out of his mouth and throws it over his shoulder, not giving a shit where it lands. Baekhyun tastes like minty toothpaste and artificial cherries; kisses with sloppy enthusiasm, the corners of his mouth sticky with sugar. After the day and night he's just had, he kind of smells like a dead thing scraped off the floor of a bar.

“You're a filthy animal,” Jongdae tells him, dropping the words into his hairline. “Absolutely disgusting.”

“And you fucking love it,” Baekhyun points out, unashamed and unconcerned.

Unfortunately, Jongdae really can't argue with that.


End file.
